In a typical group, finance is likely one of the most necessary features. But groups are sometimes slowed down by guide workflows. In line with a survey by Paylocity, an HR software program supplier, 38% of finance groups spend greater than a fourth of their time on guide jobs, like reviewing invoices.
Matthieu Hafemeister, an ex-fintech investor at Andreessen Horowitz, says he’s seen many finance orgs wrestle to scale up on account of all of the work they’re doing by hand.
“The status quo for finance is countless point solutions that are cobbled together within the finance department,” Hafemeister informed TechCrunch. “Excel continues to be the lowest common denominator, limiting the promise of automation.”
To Hafemeister’s level, most finance departments are certainly closely reliant on spreadsheets. One survey discovered that 82% nonetheless use Excel recordsdata for budgeting, forecasting, and different core monetary planning actions.
After experiencing these frustrations firsthand whereas main development at fintech agency Jeeves, Hafemeister determined to crew up with Ted Michaels, Jeeves’ earlier head of finance and an outdated buddy, to launch a platform to automate monetary duties.
Known as Concourse, the platform connects to a companies’ monetary programs to let finance groups retrieve and analyze knowledge, generate charts, and ask ad-hoc questions comparable to “What’s our non-GAAP revenue?”
“Concourse can proactively surface insights that allow finance teams to be better prepared by enabling them to stay ahead of trends,” Hafemeister stated. “Instead of a tool that tries to improve the speed or efficiency of completing a task, Concourse can be given discrete tasks to do entirely on its own.”
Now, finance automation isn’t precisely new expertise. Linq just lately emerged from stealth with AI to automate features of analysis for monetary analysts. Ledge and Doopla are additionally constructing a spread of finance-specific generative modeling instruments.
However what makes Concourse totally different, in keeping with Hafemeister, is its skill to execute monetary workflows with “complex, multi-step operations.” For instance, the platform can retrieve knowledge from an organization’s NetSuite dashboard to obtain CSV recordsdata, then copy that knowledge to an Excel spreadsheet.
“We leverage large language models to do what they are best suited for and pair them with more traditional methods of data analysis,” Hafemeister defined.
There’s nice curiosity in AI for finance. One ballot discovered that 58% of finance groups are actually utilizing some type of AI expertise, up 21% from 2023. Grand View Analysis estimates that the “AI in fintech” section, price $9.45 billion three years in the past, is rising 16.5% yearly.
However to face an opportunity of creating a dent out there for finance automation tech, Concourse should exhibit its product’s ROI — a difficult feat. Per Gartner, exhibiting or estimating the worth of AI is a high barrier to adopting it for near half of corporations.
Concourse may also must assuage potential clients’ fears of AI-introduced errors and hallucinations. In a ballot of U.Okay.-based executives by HR specialist Peninsula, 40% stated inaccuracies from AI instruments have been a key concern, adopted by issues round knowledge confidentiality.
Hafemeister stated that Concourse employs “a variety of tools and techniques” for fact-checking and validation to attempt to make sure its AI performs duties as meant. He added that Concourse doesn’t use corporations’ knowledge to coach its AI fashions — a minimum of not with out specific permission — and that the platform solely collects knowledge clients share with it.
“Data accuracy is paramount in finance, where answers are typically either entirely correct or entirely incorrect,” Hafemeister stated. “As such, at Concourse we’ve spent a lot of time and effort on delivering AI that can accurately perform the task it’s been assigned. We also take data privacy and security very seriously, and have built Concourse using industry best practices.”
People appear prepared to be take Hafemeister at his phrase.
Concourse, which continues to be in beta forward of a broader launch deliberate for subsequent yr, has a number of clients, together with Instabase and Shef, and $4.7 million in capital. Hafemeister’s ex-employer, a16z, has invested within the startup, together with Y Combinator, CRV, and Field Group.
Hafemeister says the main focus in the mean time is product growth and rising New York-based Concourse’s six-person workers.
“We raised money to hire more engineers, build out more workflows that our AI can take on, increase coverage on data integrations, and start to scale our go-to-market function,” he stated. “The strong focus on engineering recruiting is to hire backend, machine learning, and AI engineers.”
